What is BPM and How Can it Work for Us?

Throughout the web, there are many different definitions about what Business Process Management, or BPM, is. One of the versions I preferred is extracted from Wikipedia, and states:

‘As a managerial approach, BPM considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. This foundation is very similar to other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change. In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a “change capability” to an organization – both human and technological.’

More simply put, BPM workflow defines the electronic routing of tasks based on established rule sets. Once defined, these rule sets and tasks can be readily updated, allowing businesses to nimbly adapt to changes in their operating environment. This may be of particular relevance for routine, back office processes such as invoicing and claims processing, but also for processes that are  required to meet regulatory requirements, as Managers can monitor and report on process compliance.

In addition, some of the specific benefits that may be achieved, include the ability to:

• Automate time consuming manual business processes;
• Improve operational efficiency;
• Make business processes consistent and streamlined;
• Optimize complex business processes;
• Reduce processing costs; and
• Benefit from remote access to business processes.

In my previous post on documenting your processes, I mentioned several affordable options for Business Process Management. As most of the options were shown based on their offering of free process modeling tools, I’ve updated the list of BPM software to include additional Open Source options.

There were two main packages that I found in the open source BPM market, Intalio|BPM Community Edition and ProcessMaker.

Intalio was originally in the enterprise market for it’s full BPM suite, and opened up it’s community edition in 2006. The community edition is offered for free, and includes their Intalio|Designer and Intalio|Server components, training and support are offered for a price. While this suite is a robust solution for an organization, I would be concerned about recommending it to my small to mid-sized clients. The potential learning curve and the cost to train employees (which runs from 1,350 to 2,500 based on their training offered in Portland – the closest choice to my native Vancouver) may not be palatable to them.

The business model for ProcessMaker is similar though I found their free user community and wiki site more extensive than Intalio and their training was webinar based and less expensive at $995 US.

Additional open source BPM platforms include:

• Anaxagora
• JBoss JBPM
• OpenWFE built on the Ruby platform
• RunaWFE. based on the JBoss platform

These choices were more oriented towards software development and would likely not be as applicable for my clients.

Of the Open Source options above, I have chosen to further evaluate ProcessMaker, as I feel it offers the most user friendly and accessible on-line training options. As stated previously, TIBCO Business Studio remains my current favourite for entry level (and beyond) BPM.